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Hurricane Helene severely damaged western North Carolina's national forests, including a lot of old-growth trees that are over 100 years old. Conservationists had hoped those trees would get protection from the Biden administration under a proposal to try to better manage the forest to withstand climate change. But those hopes were dashed earlier this month when the foreign service abandoned the idea. Katie Myers of Grist and Blue Ridge Public Radio reports.
KATIE MYERS, BYLINE: Josh Kelly walks softly on the bare winter ground in the Pisgah National Forest near Barnardsville, North Carolina. This is an old-growth forest, but he says it's not only the trees that matter.
JOSH KELLY: Places like this that have never been logged, is you have this soil profile that is just rich in nutrients and rich in history.
MYERS: Kelly is a biologist who monitors logging for the advocacy group MountainTrue. This is a cove forest because it's between mountain ridges and rugged, so it's been left alone from logging. That means some trees here are hundreds of years old.
KELLY: Cove forests tend to be a real mix of ages. So while we have some of these big old trees, we've got middle-aged trees. We've got loads of these tiny saplings around.
MYERS: But it's still considered an old-growth forest, and they've been suffering from a change in climate, says Will Harlan. He is the Southeast director of the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental advocacy group.
WILL HARLAN: Climate change has been impacting the forests in a couple of ways, but the main two are with droughts and floods.
MYERS: The most recent floods here came with Hurricane Helene in September. It blew down an estimated 187,000 acres of forests in Western North Carolina. In 2022, the Biden administration issued an executive order to protect old-growth forests on public land from the effects of climate change. The Forest Service then got to work on what's become known as the National Old-Growth Amendment. Harlan says he had high hopes for it.
HARLAN: One thing about the Old-Growth Amendment is it really emphasized the pressure that these forests are under because of climate change.
MYERS: Two and a half years later, after a lot of research and public input, the amendment was shelved. It would have set policy for all national forests on how to manage old-growth in light of changing weather patterns. In an email, Forest Service officials did not give a reason for their action but said they hoped their findings could still be helpful. John Hatcher of the North Carolina State Forestry Association was glad the amendment is on hold. He says it was confusing and didn't allow enough logging around older trees.
JOHN HATCHER: When you look at the U.S. Forest Service having over 200 definitions for old-growth, it makes it really hard to have something like a universal framework that can be used across the Forest Service's footprint.
MYERS: It's true old growth means different things in different regions. Most of the old growth east of the Mississippi is in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Out west, old growth is much older. Hatcher says there needs to be room on Forest Service land for recreation and logging.
HATCHER: So you can still manage it in a sustainable way that strikes that balance and allows all these other uses while at the same time maintaining a healthy landscape.
MYERS: But with a changing climate, that's hard to do, says Kelly. If you log too many young trees, it weakens the older ones in extreme weather.
KELLY: Resilience to storms and blowdowns often depends on the forest around them. So the more of a forest that they have surrounding these bigger older trees, the more buffered they are from winds and storms.
MYERS: Without federal protection from climate change, the fight to save this old-growth forest will now go local. Kelly and Harlan say they are already gearing up to protect the Pisgah Forest from a logging project.
For NPR News, I'm Katie Myers in Barnardsville, North Carolina.
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